48 Rafael Karsten. [N:o 1 



spirit or soul and then by and by applied the same notion 

 to the objects of nature which consequently became looked 

 upon as inhabited by spirits and worshipped as deities, can 

 hardly be maintained. In course of time, however, man came 

 to distinguish between the object itself and an indwelling ani- 

 mating principle. Thus when Arnobius makes a heathen say 

 that he does not consider the copper, or gold, or silver, of 

 which the images are made, to be themselves deities, but that 

 in these objects he worships those spirits which the sacred 

 dedication has brought iuto them ^), he expresses an advanced 

 fetishistic view which probably was in vogue among the G-reeks 

 during the låter ages of Antiquity. 



I am aware that the view here taken with regard 

 to primitive Grreek religion is not shared by all classical stu- 

 dents. At any råte Professor Grruppe, in his recent large 

 work Qriechische Mythologie und ReligionsgescMchie, takes an 

 entirely dififerent view of the whole subject. In the foregoing 

 pages I have found it impossible to enter into a closer criti- 

 cism of the theories relating to the earliest religions ideas of 

 the Greeks presented in the aforesaid work, fundamentally 

 erroneous as I believe them to be ; my own statement, besides, 

 as far as it is convincing, implies a confutation of the rea- 

 soning underlying them. Here, however, some general words 

 may be said. 



Professor Gruppe tries to posit a primitive, prehistoric 

 stratum of thought in Greek religion ; he speaks about stone- 

 fetishes, tree- and plant-fetishes, animal-fetishes and so forth. 

 But his explauatious almost all through appear to be 

 arbitrary constriictions and fantastical fancies which he 

 has by no means been able to prove notwithstanding the ap- 

 parent compact mäss af evidence brought forward in their 

 support. In the exceedingly high importance attached to the 

 heavenly bodies and to the phenomena of hght we clearly re- 

 cognise the influence of the old mythological school with 

 all its errors and exaggerations. The starting-point for Pro- 



^) Arnob. Adv. gentes, VI, 17. Cf. St. Augustine on Trismegistus, De 

 Civit. Dei, VIII,. 23: „At ille visibilia et coatrectabilia siraulacra velut corpora 

 deorum esse asserit; inesse antem his quosdam spiritus invitatos" etc. 



